BHyVe – a Native FreeBSD Hypervisor

Michael Dexter has published a tutorial on CFT on FreeBSD‘s upcoming type 2 hypervisor known as BHyVe. The article is an easy to follow tutorial showing how to configure, build and boot a hypervisor capable host and guest system. BHyVe currently only supports modern Intel’s x86 virtualization hardware & the project itself is still currently under early development.

FreeBSD is very much lacking virtualization features (not counting jails) and the BHyVe project is excellent news for FreeBSD!

“Neel Natu and Peter Grehan unveiled BHyVe (PDF), the “BSD HyperVisor” (incl. Audio) for FreeBSD at BSDCan 2011 and kindly helped me get it up and running. I invite you to do the same and explore the many possibilities of this up and coming alternative to Linux KVM. Because BHyVe relies primarily on the Virtual Machine Manager vmm.ko kernel module, it should be portable to other BSD’s and even other operating systems. BHyVe guest virtual machines run modified FreeBSD kernels at this time and there are many opportunities to remove this limitation. Be aware that BHyVe is under active development and should be considered experimental.”